Original taken from nampuom_pycu in Felix Edmundovich Yosefovich, from the estate of Dzerzhinovo, Oshmyany district, Vilna province.

Shirt guy.
Born on August 30 (September 11), 1877 in the Dzerzhinovo estate of the Oshmyany district of the Vilna province in a wealthy family. The fourth of eight children of the nobleman Edmund-Rufin Yozefovich and Elena Ignatievna Yanushevskaya. Mother is Polish, father is Jewish. The history of the creation of this family is quite unusual: a twenty-five-year-old home teacher Edmund Yosefovich, who undertook to teach exact sciences daughters of Professor Yanushevsky, seduced 14-year-old Elena. A pedophile and a student were quickly married and under the pretext "Elenina studying at one of the best European colleges" out of sight sent to Taganrog. Edmund got a job at a local gymnasium (where Anton Chekhov was one of his students). The children went ... And the family soon returned to their homeland.

The future Chekist was born like this. Pregnant Elena Ignatievna did not notice the open cellar hatch and fell through. The same night a boy was born. The birth was difficult, but the baby was born wearing a shirt, so he was named Felix ("Happy").
He was five years old when his father died of consumption, and his 32-year-old mother was left with eight children. According to Dzerzhinsky's biographers, he was a child prodigy as a child. Indeed: from the age of six I read in Polish, from the age of seven - in Russian and in Jewish. But Felix studied average. I stayed in the first grade for the second year. The future head of the government of Poland, Joseph (Józef) Pilsudski, who studied at the same gymnasium (in 1920, his "iron" classmate will swear to personally shoot the "Pilsudski's dog" after the capture of Warsaw) noted that "the schoolboy Dzerzhinsky is dullness, mediocrity, without any bright abilities." Felix did well in only one subject - the Law of God, he even dreamed of becoming a priest, but soon "disappointed" in religion.

The mother raised her children in hostility to everything Russian, Orthodox, talking about Polish "patriots" who were hanged, shot or driven to Siberia. Dzerzhinsky later admitted: “As a boy, I dreamed of a cap of invisibility and the destruction of all Muscovites.”
The family tragedy of the Jozefovichs was the death of Felix's 12-year-old sister Wanda, whom he accidentally shot with a hunting rifle.
In such families, they usually strive from childhood to study and knowledge, and then to open their own business. But Felix began to turn early romance novels. Lost interest in studies. Once insulted and publicly slapped the teacher German language for which he was expelled from high school. He got close to criminals, worked in underground circles of Jewish youth, took part in fights, posted anti-government leaflets around the city. In 1895 he joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic group.
Childhood is over.

After reading Marx.
After the death of his mother, Felix received 1,000 rubles of inheritance and quickly drank them in local pubs (he did not appear at the funeral, and in general did not remember either his mother or father, either in letters or verbally, as if they did not exist at all), where whole for days with the same loafers, who had read Marx, he discussed plans for building a society in which it would be possible not to work.

The husband of Aldona's older sister, having learned about the "tricks" of his brother-in-law, kicked him out of the house, and Felix began the life of a professional revolutionary. He creates "boyuvki" - groups of armed youth (among his associates of that time, for example, the famous Bolshevik Antonov-Ovseenko). They incite the workers to armed riot, crack down on strikebreakers, organize terrorist attacks with dozens of victims. In the spring of 1897, Felix's “warfare” crippled a group of workers who did not want to strike with iron bars, and he was forced to flee to Kovno (Kaunas).
... The Kovno police received an intelligence report about the appearance in the city of a suspicious young man in a black hat, always pulled low over his eyes, in a black suit. He was seen in the pub, where he treated the workers from the Tillmans factory. During interrogation, they testified: the stranger had a conversation with them about committing a riot at the factory, in case of refusal he threatened to beat them severely.
On July 17, during the arrest, the young man called himself Edmund Zhebrovsky, but it soon became clear that he was "pillar nobleman Dzerzhinsky." (Subsequently his nicknames: iron felix, FD, red executioner, bloody; underground aliases: Jacek, Jakub, bookbinder, Franek, astronomer, Jozef, Domansky.) Having failed to prove his personal participation in numerous bloody showdowns (the accomplices did not betray him!), But after all, after spending a year in prison, he was exiled for three years to Vyatka province. “Both in his views and in his behavior,” the gendarmerie colonel prophetically reported to the Vilna prosecutor, “a person in the future is very dangerous, capable of all crimes.” Biographers, describing the next period of Dzerzhinsky's life, get off with general phrases: "he conducted explanatory work among the masses", "fieryly spoke at meetings." If! This was a man of action. In 1904, in the city of New Alexandria, he tried to raise an armed uprising, the signal for which would be a terrorist attack in a military unit. Felix planted dynamite in the officer's meeting, but in last moment his henchman got scared and did not detonate the bomb. I had to run over the fence.
According to Felix’s militants, they mercilessly killed everyone who was suspected of having connections with the police: “We began to suspect Bloody, and he began to hide from us. We caught him and questioned him all night. Then the judges came. At dawn, we took Bloody to the Powazki cemetery and shot him there.” One of Felix’s close associates, the militant A. Petrenko, recalled: “There were no hunters to risk their lives in the face of militants who quickly cracked down on suspects. The massacre of traitors and secret agents was a matter of prime necessity. Such episodes, which occurred almost daily, were surrounded by guarantees of the justice of the execution. The situation was such that now it is possible to condemn someone for these massacres” (RTSKHIDNI, Fund 76).
Dzerzhinsky dealt with the so-called Black Hundreds with particular cruelty. He somehow decided that the tenants of house No. 29 on Tamke Street were preparing Jewish pogrom and sentenced everyone to death. He himself described this massacre in his newspaper Chervonny Shtandart: “Our comrades carried out this on November 24th. 6 people entered the apartment along Tamka through the main entrance and 4 from the kitchen with demands not to move. Met them with gunfire; some of the gang tried to flee. There was no way to do otherwise than to resolutely pay off the criminals: time did not wait, danger threatened our comrades. In the apartment on Tamka, six or seven leaders of the "Black Hundred" fell. (Same fund.)
And what is interesting: Dzerzhinsky was arrested six times (both with a gun in his hands and with a lot of one hundred percent material evidence), but for some reason he was not tried, but expelled administratively, as they did with cheap prostitutes and parasites. Why? There is data that main reason– in a weak evidence base. Witnesses of his crimes were killed by his comrades-in-arms, judges and prosecutors were intimidated. According to Dzerzhinsky's own recollections, he "paid off with a bribe." (Sverchkov D. Krasnaya Nov. 1926. No. 9.) And where does he get such money from? And in general, what kind of chishi did he live on?

Party Gold.
Judging by the expenses, Dzerzhinsky disposed of considerable money. In the photographs of those years, he is in expensive dandy suits, patent leather shoes. Travels around Europe, lives in the best hotels and sanatoriums in Zakopane, Radom, St. Petersburg, Krakow, rests in Germany, Italy, France, conducts active correspondence with his mistresses. On May 8, 1903, he writes from Switzerland: “Again I am in the mountains above Lake Geneva, I breathe into myself fresh air and I eat great." Later he tells his sister from Berlin: “I traveled the world. It's been a month since I left Capri, I've been to the Italian and French Riviera, Monte Carlo, and even won 10 francs; then he admired the Alps in Switzerland, the mighty Jungfrau and other snowy colossi, burning with a glow at sunset. What a beautiful world! (The same fund, inventory 4, file 35.)

All this required enormous costs. In addition, huge sums were spent on the salaries of the militants (Dzerzhinsky paid 50 rubles a month each, while the average worker received 3 rubles), on the publication of newspapers, proclamations, leaflets, on the organization of congresses, the release of revolutionaries on bail, bribes to police officers , forgery of documents and much more. A cursory acquaintance with his expenses shows: annually hundreds of thousands of rubles. Who financed it?
According to one of the versions, her enemies did not spare money for organizing the unrest in Russia, according to another, the expropriation of the contents of banks was a gold mine, simply a robbery ...

Iron tailor and social-sexual.
When asked if he had been subjected to repression for revolutionary activities before October revolution, the “first Chekist” wrote in the questionnaire: “He was arrested in 97, 900, 905, 906, 908 and 912, spent only 11 years in prison, including hard labor(8 plus 3), was exiled three times, always fled.” But for what crimes - silence. It is known from books: on May 4, 1916, the Moscow Judicial Chamber sentenced him to 6 years of hard labor. But not a word about what tsarist regime only murderers were sentenced to hard labor ...

The February revolution found Dzerzhinsky in the Butyrka prison. Like a child, he rejoiced that he had learned to sew on sewing machine and even for the first time in his life earned 9 rubles, sheathing cellmates. AT free time played the fool and spied on the women from the next cell through a hole in the wall. (“Women danced, staged live pictures. Then they demanded the same from men. We stood in such a place and in such a position so that they could see ...” Y. Krasny-Rotshtadt.)
On March 1, 1917, Felix was released. He left Butyrka barely alive - the cellmates, having convicted the head of the prison of knocking, severely beat him. However, he did not return to Poland. For some time he hung around Moscow, and then he left for Petrograd. What is interesting: leaving the casemate with holey pockets and in a hat with fish fur, he soon begins to send his mistress Sophia Mushkat to Switzerland 300 rubles a month to the address credit bank in Zurich. And he conducts all correspondence and forwarding through Germany, which is hostile to Russia! ..

THIEF. (Great October Revolution).
Right after February Revolution(as soon as it smells of fried!) political adventurers, international terrorists, crooks and swindlers of all stripes come to Russia from all over the world. The July attempt to seize power by the Bolsheviks fails miserably. In August, the VI Congress of the Bolsheviks gathers ... Dzerzhinsky, who dreamed of “killing all Muscovites” as a child, suddenly decides to rid them of the exploiters. And although he was never a Bolshevik, he was immediately elected to the Central Committee of the party and arranged a secret meeting with Lenin hiding in Razliv.
Former political enemies (Bolsheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc.) temporarily unite in a united front and, with joint efforts, on November 7 (October 25, O.S.) capture the captain's bridge Russian Empire. At first they swore that they came to power only before the congress Constituent Assembly, but as soon as the deputies arrived in Petrograd, they were simply dispersed. “There is no morality in politics,” Lenin declared, “but there is only expediency.”
Dzerzhinsky played an active role in the seizure of power. “Lenin has become completely insane, and if someone has influence on him, it’s only“ Comrade Felix ”. Dzerzhinsky is an even bigger fanatic, - wrote People's Commissar Leonid Krasin - and, in essence, a cunning beast, intimidating Lenin with counter-revolution and the fact that it will sweep away all of us and him in the first place. And Lenin, I was finally convinced of this, is a real coward, trembling for his own skin. And Dzerzhinsky plays on this string ... "

After October, Lenin sent the eternally dirty, unshaven, constantly dissatisfied "iron Felix" to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs as a person who knows the criminal world and prison life. There he sent everyone whose heads were already cut by prison machines ...
December 7, 1917 Council People's Commissars hastily creates the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to combat counter-revolution and sabotage. And although this commission is assigned the role of an investigative committee, the sanctions of its members are much wider: “Measures - confiscation, expulsion, deprivation of cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc.” According to Latsis (he headed the department of the Cheka for the fight against counter-revolution. - Ed.), "Felix Edmundovich himself asked for a job in the Cheka." He quickly gets up to speed, and if in December he himself often goes to searches and arrests, then at the beginning of 1918, having occupied a vast building with cellars and basements on the Lubyanka, he begins to personally form a team.

Mokrushnik number 1.
First statistically official victim A certain Prince Eboli is considered to be a security officer, who “on behalf of the Cheka, robbed bourgeois in restaurants.” Since his execution, the countdown of the victims of the totalitarian regime began. Under the verdict is the signature of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
…Known fact. In 1918, at one of the meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, where the issue of supply was discussed, Lenin sent a note to Dzerzhinsky: "How many malicious counter-revolutionaries do we have in prisons?" The first Chekist wrote on a piece of paper: "About 1500." exact figure he did not know those arrested - they put anyone in jail without understanding. Vladimir Ilyich chuckled, put a cross next to the figure, and handed the paper back. Felix Edmundovich left.
That same night, "about 1,500 malicious counter-revolutionaries" were put up against the wall. Later, Lenin's secretary Fotieva explained: “There was a misunderstanding. Vladimir Ilyich did not want to be shot at all. Dzerzhinsky did not understand him. Our leader usually puts a cross on the note as a sign that he has read it and taken note of it.
In the morning, both pretended that nothing extraordinary had happened. The Council of People's Commissars discussed a paramount issue: a long-awaited train with food was approaching Moscow.
The former commissar of the Cheka, V. Belyaev, who fled abroad, published the names of the “counter-revolutionaries” in his book. “List of executed, starved, tortured, slaughtered, strangled scientists and writers: Khristina Alchevskaya, Leonid Andreev, Konstantin Arsentiev, Val. Bianchi, prof. Alexander Borozdin, Nikolai Velyaminov, Semyon Vengerov, Alexei and Nikolai Veselovsky, L. Vilkina - wife of N. Minsky, historian Vyazigin, prof. physicist Nicholas Gezehus, prof. Vladimir Gessen, astronomer Dm. Dubyago, prof. Mich. Dyakonov, geologist Alexander Inostrantsev, prof. economics Andrey Isaev, political economist Nikolai Kablukov, economist Alexander Kaufman, philosopher of law Bogdan Kostyakovsky, O. Lemm, novelist Dm. Lieven, historian Dmitry Kobeko, physicist A. Kolli, novelist S. Kondrushkin, historian Dm. Korsakov, prof. S. Kulakovsky, historian Iv. Luchitsky, historian I. Malinovsky, prof. V. Matveev, historian Petr Morozov, prof. Kazan University Darius Naguevsky, prof. Bor. Nikolsky, literary historian Dm. Ovsyannikov-Kulikovsky, prof. Joseph Pokrovsky, botanist V. Polovtsev, prof. D. Radlov, philosopher Vas. Rozanov, prof. O. Rozenberg, poet A. Roslavlev, prof. F. Rybakov, prof. A. Speransky, Cl. Timiryazev, prof. Tugan-Baranovsky, prof. B. Turaev, prof. K. Fochsch, prof. A. Chess ... and many others, you, Lord, weigh their names.
This was just the beginning. More will be added to these names soon. famous people Russia.
In the first years of my work as an investigator, I managed to catch alive the first Chekists, demoted to the police for sins. Old veterans were sometimes frank: “I remember that they caught several suspicious types - and in the Cheka. They put on a bench, in the yard, a car engine to the fullest, so that passersby would not hear the shots. The commissioner approaches: you, bastard, will you confess? Raz a bullet in the belly! They ask others: you bastards have something to confess Soviet power? Those on their knees ... They even told what was not there. And how searches were carried out! We drive up to the house on Tverskoy Boulevard. Night. We surround. And all the apartments ... All the valuables in the office, the bourgeoisie in the basement on the Lubyanka! .. That was work! And what about Dzerzhinsky? He shot himself."
In 1918, the Chekist detachments consisted of sailors and Latvians. One such sailor entered the chairman's office drunk. He made a remark, the sailor in response overlaid with a three-story one. Dzerzhinsky pulled out a revolver and, having put the sailor on the spot with several shots, he immediately fell in an epileptic fit.
In the archives, I dug up the protocol of one of the first meetings of the Cheka on February 26, 1918: “We heard about the act of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. Decided: the responsibility for the act bears himself and he alone, Dzerzhinsky. Henceforth, all decisions on executions are decided in the Cheka, and decisions are considered positive with half the members of the commission, and not personally, as was the case with Dzerzhinsky's act. From the text of the resolution it is clear: Dzerzhinsky shot personally. I did not manage to find out the names of those who were shot, and, apparently, no one will be able to, but one thing is clear - in those days it was a misdemeanor at the level of a childish prank.

Felix and his team.
Dzerzhinsky's faithful assistant and deputy was Yakov Peters - with a mane of black hair, a depressed nose, a large narrow-lipped mouth and cloudy eyes. He flooded the Don, Petersburg, Kyiv, Kronstadt, Tambov with blood. Another deputy, Martyn Sudrabs, is better known under the pseudonym Latsis. This pearl belongs to him: “The established customs of war ... according to which prisoners are not shot and so on, all this is ridiculous. Slaughter all prisoners in battles against you - that's the law civil war". Latsis covered Moscow, Kazan, Ukraine with blood. A member of the Board of the Cheka, Alexander Eiduk, did not hide the fact that the murder for him was a sexual ecstasy. Contemporaries remembered his pale face, a broken arm and a Mauser in the other. The head of the Special Department of the Cheka, Mikhail Kedrov, ended up in a lunatic asylum already in the 1920s. Prior to that, he and his mistress Rebekah Meisel put children aged 8-14 in prisons and, under the pretext class struggle shot. Georgiy Atarbekov, the “plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka”, was especially cruel. In Pyatigorsk, with a detachment of Chekists, he chopped up about a hundred captured hostages with swords, and personally stabbed General Ruzsky with a dagger. During the retreat from Armavir, he shot several thousand Georgians in the KGB cellars - officers, doctors, sisters of mercy, returning to their homeland after the war. When the Wrangel detachment approached Ekaterinodar, he ordered about two thousand more prisoners to be placed against the wall, most of whom were not guilty of anything.
In Kharkov, the name of Chekist Saenko was horrifying. This frail, obviously mentally ill man with a nervously twitching cheek, stuffed with drugs, ran around the prison on Cold Mountain, covered in blood. When the whites entered Kharkov and dug up the corpses, most of them had broken ribs, broken legs, chopped off heads, all had traces of torture with red-hot iron.
In Georgia, the commandant of the local "emergency" Shulman, a drug addict and homosexual, was distinguished by pathological cruelty. Here is how an eyewitness describes the execution of 118 people: “The condemned were lined up in ranks. Shulman and his assistant with guns in their hands went along the line, shooting in the forehead of the condemned, stopping from time to time to load the revolver. Not everyone dutifully shook their heads. Many fought, cried, shouted, asked for mercy. Sometimes Shulman's bullet only wounded them, the wounded were immediately finished off with shots and bayonets, and the dead were thrown into the pit. The whole scene went on for at least three hours."
And what were the atrocities of Aron Kogan (better known under the pseudonym Bela Kun), Unshlikht, the dwarf and sadist Deribas, investigators of the Cheka Mindlin and Baron Pilyar von Pilhau. Chekist women did not lag behind men: in the Crimea - Zemlyachka, in Yekaterinoslavl - Gromova, in Kyiv - "Comrade Rose", in Penza - Bosch, in Petrograd - Yakovlev and Stasova, in Odessa - Ostrovskaya. In the same Odessa, for example, the Hungarian Remover arbitrarily shot 80 arrested people. Subsequently, she was declared mentally ill on the basis of sexual perversion.
Did Dzerzhinsky know about the atrocities committed on behalf of the Soviet government by his henchmen? Based on the analysis of hundreds of documents, he certainly knew and encouraged.

It was he who signed most of the search warrants and arrest warrants, his signature is on the verdicts, he wrote secret instructions on the total recruitment of secret agents and secret agents in all spheres of society. “You must always remember the methods of the Jesuits, who did not make noise to the whole square about their work and did not flaunt it,” the “iron Felix” taught in secret orders, “but were secretive people who knew about everything and only knew how to act ...” The main direction of work He considers Chekists secret information and requires everyone to recruit as many secret agents as possible. “In order to acquire secret employees,” Dzerzhinsky teaches, “it is necessary to have a constant and lengthy conversation with the arrested, as well as their relatives and friends ... Interest in full rehabilitation in the presence of compromising material obtained by searches and undercover information ... Take advantage of discord in the organization and quarrels between individuals ... Interest financially.
What kind of provocations did he not push his subordinates with his instructions!
A White Guard detachment raids Khmelnitsk. The Bolsheviks were arrested, they were led through the whole city, urging them on with kicks and rifle butts. The walls of houses are dotted with appeals calling for enrollment in white guard... And in reality it turned out that all this was a provocation of the Chekists, who decided to identify the enemies of the Soviet regime. The Communists paid with fake bruises, but those who were immediately identified by the whole list were put to waste.
The scope of the repressions only in 1918 is evidenced by official statistics published in the Cheka itself in those years: “245 uprisings were suppressed, 142 counter-revolutionary organizations were uncovered, 6,300 people were shot.” Of course, the Chekists were obviously modest here. According to the calculations of independent sociologists, several million were actually killed.

Legends and myths of the USSR.
Much has been written about how Dzerzhinsky worked to the point of wear and tear and did not show up to doctors in principle. Allegedly, even the Politburo was asked about the state of health of the chairman of the GPU. In fact, more than anything in the world, Felix Edmundovich loved and valued his own health. The archives contain hundreds of documents confirming this.
What kind of diseases he did not find in himself: tuberculosis, bronchitis, trachoma, and stomach ulcers. Where he just was not treated, in what sanatoriums he did not rest. Becoming chairman of the Cheka-GPU, he traveled to best houses holidays several times a year. Kremlin doctors constantly examine him: they find “bloating and recommend enemas”, but the conclusion about his next analysis is “spermatozoa were found in Comrade Dzerzhinsky’s morning urine ...”. Every day he is given coniferous baths, and the KGB officer Olga Grigorieva is personally responsible for ensuring that "the enemies of the proletariat do not mix poison into the water."
According to colleagues, Dzerzhinsky ate poorly and drank “empty boiling water or some kind of surrogate. Like everyone else ... ”(Chekist Yan Buikis), and he strove to give the daily ration of bread to a guard or a mother of many children on the street.
“Felix Edmundovich was sitting, bending over the papers. He cordially rose to meet unexpected guests. On the edge of the table in front of him stood an unfinished glass of cold tea, on a saucer - a small piece of black bread.
- And what's that? Sverdlov asked. - No appetite?
“I have an appetite, but there is not enough bread in the republic,” Dzerzhinsky joked. “So we stretch the rations for the whole day ...”
I will quote only two documents. Here, for example, is what the Kremlin doctors recommended to Dzerzhinsky:
"one. White meat is allowed - chicken, turkey, hazel grouse, veal, fish;
2. Avoid black meat; 3. Greens and fruits; 4. Any flour dishes; 5. Avoid mustard, pepper, hot spices.
And here is the menu. Dzerzhinsky:
“Mon. Game consommé, fresh salmon, Polish cauliflower;
Tue. Mushroom solyanka, veal cutlets, spinach with egg;
Wednesday. Asparagus soup, bully beef, Brussels sprouts;
Thursday Boyar stew, steam sterlet, greens, peas;
Fri. Puree from flowers cabbage, sturgeon, maitre d' beans;
Saturday. Sterlet ear, turkey with pickles (urine apple, cherry, plum), mushrooms in sour cream;
Sunday Fresh champignon soup, marengo chicken, asparagus. (The fund is the same, inventory 4.)
Trotsky recalled that after the seizure of power, he and Lenin gorged themselves on caviar, that “it is not only in my memory that the first years of the revolution are colored with this unchanging caviar.”

Red terrorists.
In May 1918, 20-year-old Yakov Blyumkin entered the Cheka, who was immediately entrusted with the leadership of the department for combating German espionage.
On July 6, Blyumkin and N. Andreev arrive at Denezhny Lane, where the German embassy was located, and present a mandate for the right to negotiate with the ambassador. Signed on paper by Dzerzhinsky, Ksenofontov's secretary, registration number, stamp and seal.
During the conversation, Blumkin shoots at the ambassador, detonates two grenades, and the "diplomats" themselves hide in confusion. An unprecedented international scandal flares up. Dzerzhinsky, without blinking an eye, declares that his signature was forged on the mandate ... But there is no doubt that everything was organized by him. Firstly, he is categorically against peace with Germany (large-scale operations were planned against Germany). Secondly, the Bolsheviks need a pretext for reprisals against the Socialist-Revolutionaries (it was they who were declared the murderers of the ambassador). And thirdly, Yakov Blyumkin was promoted for all these little things.
On July 8, Pravda published a statement by Dzerzhinsky: “In view of the fact that I am undoubtedly one of the main witnesses in the case of the murder of the German envoy Count Mirbach, I do not consider it possible for myself to remain in the Cheka ... as its chairman, as well as take any part in the commission at all. I ask the Council of People's Commissars to release me."

No one was involved in the investigation of the murder, no handwriting examination was carried out regarding the authenticity of the signature, and yet the Central Committee of the party removes him from his post. True, not for long. Already on August 22, Felix "rises from the ashes" - he occupies his former chair. And on time. On the night of August 24-25, the Cheka arrested more than a hundred prominent figures of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, accusing them of counter-revolution and terrorism. In response, on August 30, Leonid Kanegisser killed the chairman of the Petrograd "emergency" Moisei Uritsky. Dzerzhinsky personally travels to Petrograd and orders 1,000 people to be shot in revenge.
On August 30, Lenin is shot. Chekists accuse Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan of assassination. Dzerzhinsky gives the green light to a massacre in Moscow.

Great family man.
And now let's dwell on a private moment in the life of a person "with clean hands and a warm heart." At a time when the country is in the ring of the Civil War and the "Red Terror" has been declared, when concentration camps are being created at an accelerated pace, and a wave of general arrests has swept over the state, Dzerzhinsky, under the fictitious name Domansky, suddenly goes abroad.

“At the insistence of Lenin and Sverdlov, in October 1918, exhausted by inhuman tension, he left for several days in Switzerland, where his family was,” the Chekist P. Malkov, commandant of the Kremlin, would later write.
Did Felix have a family? Indeed, at the end of August 1910, 33-year-old Felix made a trip with 28-year-old Sofya Muskat to the famous resort of Zakopane. On November 28, Sophia left for Warsaw, and they never met again.

On June 23, 1911, her son Jan was born, whom she passed in Orphanage because the child suffered from a mental disorder. The question arises: if they considered themselves husband and wife, why shouldn’t Mushkat come to Russia, where the husband is far from last man? Why did he go himself, risking falling into the clutches of special services, foreign police or emigrants? The most striking thing is that he is not going anywhere, but to Germany, where the public demanded immediate and severe punishment for the murderers of Mirbach, and where, of course, no one believed in the fairy tale about the villainous Socialist-Revolutionaries.
There were no official announcements about Dzerzhinsky's upcoming tour. True, it is known that with him was a member of the Board of the Cheka and the secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, V. Avanesov, who could take "comrade Domansky" under his protection in case of any complications.
At my request, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs checked the issuance of visas for leaving Russia in September-October 1918. There are no documents for the departure of Dzerzhinsky-Domansky and Avanesov. Therefore, the trip was illegal. For what purpose they left, one can only guess, but that they did not go on a pleasure trip and not empty-handed, one can not doubt. After all, Soviet "lemons" were not accepted for payment abroad. Even for using the toilet you had to pay with foreign currency. Where does the Chekists come from?
In September 1918, a Soviet diplomatic mission was opened in Switzerland. A certain Brightman was appointed its first secretary. He attaches Sofya Mushkat there, who takes her son Jan from orphanage. Dzerzhinsky arrives in Switzerland and takes his family to the luxurious resort of Lugano, where he occupies the best hotel. In the photographs of that time, he is without a beard, in an expensive coat and suit, happy with life, the weather and his affairs. He left a soldier's tunic and a shabby overcoat in his office in the Lubyanka.

So for what purpose did Dzerzhinsky travel abroad? Let's turn to the facts. November 5 German government break off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia and expels the Soviet embassy from Berlin. On November 9, under the threat of family murder, Wilhelm II abdicates the throne. November 11 revolution in Austria-Hungary (led by Bela Kun) overthrows the Habsburg monarchy.
For actions incompatible with diplomacy, the Swiss government expels the Soviet diplomatic mission, and Sophia Mushkat and the Brightmans are searched. In a letter to one of Dzerzhinsky's deputies, Ya. Berzin, who was the main executor of "revolutions" and political assassinations abroad, Lenin insists that foreign Zionists "Kater or Schneider from Zurich", Nubaker from Geneva, leaders of the Italian mafia, living in Lugano (!), requires them to spare no gold and pay them "for their work and travel generously", "and give Russian fools work, send clippings, not random numbers ...".

Isn't that the key to the puzzle?
Not having time to gain a foothold in power, the Bolsheviks export the revolution abroad. To finance these revolutions, they could only give the loot - gold, jewelry, paintings by great masters. The transfer of all this could be entrusted only to the most "iron comrades". As a result, in short term almost the entire gold reserve of Russia was thrown into the wind. And in the banks of Europe and America, accounts began to appear: Trotsky - 1 million dollars and 90 million Swiss francs; Lenin - 75 million Swiss francs; Zinoviev - 80 million Swiss francs; Ganetsky - 60 million Swiss francs and 10 million dollars; Dzerzhinsky - 80 million Swiss francs.
By the way, from the published letters of Dzerzhinsky to his sister Aldona, who lived in Vienna with her millionaire husband, it is clear that he even sent valuable things to her.
Born in a shirt, Dzerzhinsky really turned out to be a lucky man. He was lucky - he did not live up to the thirty-seventh year. Was not poisoned, shot, executed. He died a natural death, short of his forty-nineth birthday, on July 20, 1926 at 4:40 pm in his Kremlin apartment. A few hours later, the famous pathologist Abrikosov, in the presence of five more doctors, performed an autopsy of the body and found that death had occurred "from heart paralysis, which developed as a result of spasmodic closure of the lumen of the venous arteries." (RTSKHIDNI, fund 76, inventory 4, file 24.)

This formula, uttered by the founder of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, determined what a real Chekist should be like. AT Soviet time the official myth claimed that such security officers were almost without exception. Accordingly, the Red Terror was portrayed as a forced destruction of the implacable enemies of the Soviet regime, revealed through a scrupulous collection of evidence. The picture, to put it mildly, did not correspond to reality. And if so, you will get a new myth: the communists, as soon as they came to power, began to methodically destroy the “gene pool of the nation”.

The Red Terror became the most grim phenomenon of the initial stage Soviet history and one of the indelible stains on the reputation of the communists. It turns out that the whole history of the communist regime is a continuous terror, first Leninist, then Stalinist. In reality, outbursts of terror alternated with lulls, when the authorities managed to get by with the repressions that are characteristic of an ordinary authoritarian society.

The October Revolution took place under the slogan of the abolition death penalty. The resolution of the Second Congress of Soviets read: "The death penalty restored by Kerensky at the front is abolished." The death penalty in the rest of Russia was abolished by the Provisional Government. scary word The “revolutionary tribunal” was initially covered up by a rather mild attitude towards “enemies of the people”. Kadetka S.V. Panina, who hid the funds of the Ministry of Education from the Bolsheviks, on December 10, 1917, the Revolutionary Tribunal issued a public censure.

Bolshevism entered the taste of repressive politics gradually. Despite the formal absence of the death penalty, the killings of prisoners were sometimes carried out by the Cheka during the “cleansing” of cities from criminals.

More wide application executions, and even more so, carrying them out on political matters, was impossible both because of the prevailing democratic sentiments, and because of the presence of the Left Social Revolutionaries in the government - principled opponents of the death penalty. The People's Commissar of Justice from the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, I. Sternberg, prevented not only executions, but even arrests for political reasons. Since the Left SRs were actively working in the Cheka, it was difficult to deploy government terror at that time. However, work in the punitive bodies influenced the psychology of the Socialist-Revolutionary Chekists, who became more and more tolerant of repression.

The situation began to change after the Left SRs left the government, and especially after the outbreak of a large-scale civil war in May-June 1918. Lenin explained to his comrades that in a civil war, the absence of the death penalty was unthinkable. After all, supporters opposing sides they are not afraid of imprisonment for any term, as they are confident in the victory of their movement and the release of their prisons.

The first public victim of political execution was A.M. Happy. He commanded the Baltic Fleet at the beginning of 1918 and, in difficult ice conditions, led the fleet from Helsingfors to Kronstadt. Thus, he saved the fleet from being captured by the Germans. Shchastny's popularity grew, the Bolshevik leadership suspected him of nationalist, anti-Soviet and Bonapartist sentiments. People's Commissariat of War Trotsky feared that the commander of the fleet might oppose the Soviet regime, although there was some evidence of preparation coup d'état did not have. Shchastny was arrested and, after a trial at the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, he was shot on June 21, 1918. Shchastny's death gave rise to a legend that the Bolsheviks were fulfilling the order of Germany, which took revenge on Shchastny, who took away Baltic Fleet from under the noses of the Germans. But then the communists would not have had to kill Shchastny, but simply give the ships to the Germans - which, of course, Lenin did not do. It’s just that the Bolsheviks sought to eliminate the candidates for Napoleon before they prepared the 18th Brumaire. Evidence of guilt was the last thing they were interested in.

A security officer must have a cold head, a warm heart and clean hands.
As the researchers suggest, this phrase first appeared in the book by N. I. Zubov (ch. 6) “Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky: short biography"(1941). In the book, this is a direct speech by F. E. Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926): “Only a person with cold head with a warm heart and clean hands."

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"A security officer must have a cold head, a warm heart and clean hands" in books